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Nailing the Entrepreneurial Mindset

Posted by on 12 May 2015
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Q: How did you
develop the Swarm Enterprise Profiler?

A: We started by getting inside the
hearts and minds of serial, successful entrepreneurs
We knew that the Swarm Crowd Profiler is amazing for the
very front-end of innovation, the phase when you are generating, refining and
evaluating ideas. Swarm Vision is designed to dramatically improve that stage
of the innovation process, and it delivers.
But we know well that it takes more than ideas to innovate.
It requires getting real products to market, and driving widespread market
adoption. That takes a whole host of additional skills beyond ideation, skills that
rarely occur in one person.
We also know that innovation leaders generate higher
financial returns, and that they innovate across the entire product lifecycle:
from R&D to product development, from production to marketing. So we set
ourselves the task of identifying the full range of innovation and
entrepreneurial skills needed, not just to generate killer ideas, but to create
real products and businesses that drive market results.
After absorbing gobs of available research, we started by
interviewing serial successful entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs in Silicon
Valley, and their advisors and investors who know them intimately. We went with
Silicon Valley because it's where we are located, it's unquestionably the
hotbed of innovation in the world, and because it attracts innovators from all
over the world. These are people who
have achieved multiple 'exits,' created billions in shareholder value, whose
companies have gone global and continue to prosper. Interviewing them was an
honor, and truly fascinating!
We soon realized that a lot of the academic studies on
entrepreneurs get it wrong. They see entrepreneurs from a non-entrepreneur's
perspective. One example: academic research on entrepreneurs is all about 'risk
tolerance' and 'ambiguity tolerance.' But in our interviews, to a person, not a
single entrepreneur even mentioned the word 'risk.' They just don't look at
what they are doing through the lens of risk. Taking on big, real-world
challenges lets them live life more intensely. It's a way to pursue their
interests and passions. Offer them an ordinary 'secure' job, and they react,
'But why'? When situations are undefined, that's when entrepreneurs feel most
engaged and useful.
Nonetheless, we wanted to give the academic research a fair
chance. We ran two global studies, and included 'proven' academic scales
alongside our own questions. Again and again, our new questions, inspired by
our interviews, out-performed the 'proven scales.' That means our questions
more clearly differentiated entrepreneurs from the general population. And our
questions not only correlated better with entrepreneurs, but with real world business
results.

Contact: Suzan@totembrand.com,
Suzan Briganti, CEO, Totem Inc.


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